Inspired by film director Wes Anderson in her collection “Let Her Dance,” junior student Dayra Cardoze created fashion-forward yet wearable pieces for last month’s undergraduate fashion show at the School of the Art Institute. If great style is a savvy mix of opposites, Cardoze hit a sweet spot with her “double personality” garments—basically two looks sewn into a single outfit. “By combining unexpected prints, shapes, textures, and colors I created three contrasting garments that are an homage to his whimsical and peculiar style,” she explains on her website....

The great German, then American, director Ernst Lubitsch is currently featured as FilmStruck‘s “director of the week,” and they have a generous selection of his films spanning most of his career. A master of deft and witty romantic comedies, his legendary “Lubitsch touch” began in the teens and graced a wider range of films than his celebrated comedy films. The Shop Around the CornerThere are no art deco nightclubs, shimmering silk gowns, or slamming bedroom doors to be seen, but this 1940 film is one of Lubitsch’s finest and most enduring works, a romantic comedy of dazzling range that takes place almost entirely within the four walls of a leather-goods store in prewar Budapest....

24 A quick look at the temperatures recorded and predicted for this week makes it hard to tell which season we’re in: fall, spring, or summer. A quick look at the movie premiere schedule, however, indicates we are already in blockbuster season. So it makes sense that Fox would roll out 24: Live Another Day, the latest “worst day ever” in the life of Jack Bauer, a CIA agent-cum-fugitive. The new miniseries (at 12 episodes, it’s half the length of a regular season) has all the blustering action and great cinematography of its previous iterations, as well as a (possibly) controversial take on a hot-button issue....

Around 1997, before the CTA used payment cards, wine company owner Rodney Alex, now 50, got locked up for fare evasion after jumping the turnstile at the Harrison Red Line stop, next to Jones College Prep high school. When he and the officers showed up for his court date, the judge dismissed the charges. “He seemed kind of annoyed,” Alex says. “There’s no way cops should be wasting time taking someone in for stealing $2....

Sometimes it’s hard to say “I love you” because words just aren’t enough. That’s where I am with this review of Parachute, the new Korean, or rather “Korean-American” restaurant in Avondale from husband-and-wife chefs Johnny Clark and Beverly Kim, a Top Cheftestant who appeared on the show during her tenure at Aria. My head still isn’t right after my meals at Parachute, maybe in part because the last time they opened a restaurant together, taking over Logan Square’s Bonsoiree with a 12-course Korean-influenced prix fixe menu, I thoroughly hated it....

Christmas would not be complete without The Nutcracker. The Joffrey Ballet’s production choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon tells a magical story of love and family and the 1893 World’s Fair. Or, try the House Theater of Chicago’s alternative: an inspiring, ballet-free rendition. “Merry, Merry Chicago!” 12/14-12/23, dates and times vary; see website, and Handel Messiah 12/19-12/23, times vary; see website, Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan, 312-294-3000, cso.org, $41-$155. A Klingon Christmas Carol Through 12/16: Thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat-Sun 3 and 8 PM; no performances Sat 12/1, 3 PM, Edge Theater, 5451 N....

Every classic play comes with its own set of commonplaces—those little hooks we pick up in school, giving us the shorthand we need so we can appear at least halfway educated. Long Day’s Journey Into Night is autobiographical. The girl in The Glass Menagerie is Tennessee Williams’s sister. Picnic is by a closeted gay guy. Nothing happens in Waiting for Godot, but nothing is the point because it’s absurd. Shakespearean English isn’t so hard to understand once you get the hang of it....

Lyric Opera’s The Merry Widow, emphatically set in Paris on the eve of the 20th century, opened 24 hours after last week’s terrorist attack there. With the body count still being tallied, the atmosphere at the Civic Opera House was subdued. The audience stood and sang as the orchestra played “La Marseillaise” before curtain, and when the scene called for fireworks over Montmartre, complete with explosive sound effects, it was impossible not to be reminded of the real-world carnage....

Steve Earle opens his latest album, So You Wannabe an Outlaw (Warner Brothers), with a cautionary tale that asks listeners considering his outsider path to think twice. If anyone can offer such warnings, it’s Earle, whose anti-Nashville posturing and copious substance abuse eventually landed him in jail. The title track features a cameo from fellow Texan Willie Nelson, one of Earle’s early inspirations and another singer who’s taunted mortality (and prison) for decades, but it’s Earle that sings, “Won’t nobody give a damn about you when you die / But the devil he comes for his due”—and while I’m pretty sure the singer is still alive, we get the point....

It’s hard to put a positive spin on the release of a video showing a white Chicago police officer needlessly snuffing out the life of a black teen, but Mayor Emanuel did his best Tuesday afternoon. ​​”This episode can be a moment of understanding and learning,” ​the mayor said at a press conference at police headquarters​.​ That the mayor would focus on police becoming “fetal” was especially remarkable given that​ ​he was well aware, when he made those comments, ​of the dashboard-camera video showing the final moments of Laquan McDonald’s ​brief ​life—a life ended by officer Jason Van Dyke on an evening in October 2014....

Even though this highly fictionalized 1972 musical, based on the life of the ne’er-do-well son of the eighth-century warrior king Charlemagne was made for the Broadway stage—where it ran for 1,944 performances from October 23, 1972, to June 12, 1977—it transfers very gracefully to a considerably smaller cabaret space—namely the Venus Cabaret, recently carved out of a former Irish pub by the folks at Mercury Theater. In fact, as revealed in this revival, the show has a sweet intimacy about it that can get lost in the razzle-dazzle of a big production....

Aimee Levitt It’s like the Great Barrier Reef, only it’s on a street in Rogers Park and there are no fish. It’s March. We’re all still wearing our snow boots and long underwear, which are starting to get a little rank by now. There’s not enough booze, Girl Scout cookies, or even paczki in this whole stupid world to compensate for this shitty, shitty winter. But if you still have a molecule of optimism left inside of you, try to see last weekend’s snowstorm not as another opportunity to pretend you’re living in Siberia (you are a political prisoner, you have been sent to the gulag, your continued survival is a triumph of the human spirit, etc) but as a chance to get to know snow in all its multifarious forms....

Crawling out of a misty bog, his hair like Don King’s on a bad day, bass-baritone Eric Owens stole the show as goblin king Vodnik in Dvořák’s Rusalka at Lyric Opera this spring. He was comically randy one minute, tragically bereft the next—never mind his clown-size three-toed feet. These days opera singers are asked to perform in all sorts of odd positions (before long I expect to see an aria sung in downward-facing dog), but Owens projected majesty even while “air swimming” across the stage floor....

Twenty-eight years. That’s how long it’s been since the last time a Cook County judge was voted out of office. This election year, as on every even year when we hit the polls to pick a president or governor, Cook County voters are also asked to vote on 39 candidates trying to join the judiciary for the first time and vote “yes” or “no” to keep another 61 judges already on the bench....

It’s August, and under the Cermak and Western viaduct, scraps of plastic, broken glass, and discarded chicken bones collect like autumn leaves. A line of yellow freight cars languishes on the tracks above. Near an LED sign for a grocery store, a new billboard is striking in its starkness. But it’s not an ad. Rather, it’s a black-and-white drawing of two proud black farmworkers. The project’s execution, however, was not without drawbacks....

For his recent album Waterworks (Thrill Jockey) Boston fingerstyle-guitar specialist Glenn Jones planted his spindly, quietly virtuosic take on John Fahey’s American Primitive style within the acoustically challenging Metropolitan Waterworks Museum. To adapt to the space he and longtime friend Matthew Azevedo, who’s mastered his recordings for 15 years, devised a 20-channel setup, but as they prepared for the June 2015 performance the project became more interactive, Azevedo complementing the guitar (and occasional) banjo lines with field recordings and subtle harmonium and synthesizer accents....

Alex Friedland “I overcome . . .” In her column this week, arts writer Deanna Isaacs shared her impressions of the inaugural Great Chicago Fire Fest, a $2 million fire-on-water spectacle that Redmoon will stage on the main branch of the Chicago River in October. Last week Redmoon invited “donors and VIPs” (and journalists and photographers) to get an early look at what they’re working on. This take on the city, as a hub of mass recovery, isn’t likely to inspire any travel plans by the international set....

Courtesy Poisoned Mind Records Cover art for the Black Devil Doll From Hell soundtrack Last year Chester Novell Turner, an underground horror director from Chicago’s west side who made a couple shot-on-video movies in the 80s, returned from the dead—sort of. He stopped making movies after 1987’s Tales From the Quadead Zone, and as more fans of low-budget cult films sought out his work, the rumor spread that he’d died in a car accident in 1996....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, January 27, 2016. Luis Gutiérrez: Trump can tweet, but he doesn’t have real solutions to Chicago violence U.S. rep Luis Gutiérrez says that President Donald Trump is using Chicago’s violence surge for his “own political gain” and doesn’t have any real solutions. Trump tweeted Tuesday evening that he will “send in the feds” to Chicago if the “carnage” doesn’t stop. “I think what President Trump has done is simply say ‘Look at the carnage’ without offering a solution,'” the Democratic congressman, who represents large areas of the south and west sides, said on CNN Thursday....

We’re in the middle of N.W.A yearbook season. Straight Outta Compton, a long-in-the-works biopic on the iconic LA hip-hop group, comes out Friday, a full week after the release of Dr. Dre’s unexpected third album, Compton: A Soundtrack By Dr. Dre, which was inspired by the making of the N.W.A film. Since the windup to the first part of this massive one-two hip-hop-legacy punch landed—which we can place at about two weeks ago, when Dre announced the imminent release of his album—the floodgates for the Straight Outta Compton content stream have opened....